Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Daily Archives: July 22, 2016

The big primary digit patch day always contains its share of chaos, and all the more so for me because I adamantly refuse to read about upcoming changes and features in advance. I hate to spoil the surprise. So when Blizzard sent me an email notification about the WoW 7.0 patch asking if I was prepared, my answer was an unequivocal, “Um… no?”

Wait, I was supposed to be prepared? What am I, a boy scout?

On the first day of the reign of 7.0, I logged in for just a couple of minutes simply to verify that the patch was there… and to make some more hexweave cloth.

My big end of garrison plan was to invest everything into supplies to make hexweave bags. My tailor will be sitting in his garrison for the next few week cranking out 30 slot bags because bag space is still a good thing.

The next night I logged in for a bit to check on my main and to see how things looked. I still wasn’t able to face the addon apocalypse that accompanies all such major updates. I try to keep addons to a minimum simply because their authors come and go and you can never be sure as to what addon will still be around after a year of no patches.

And even still, the Curse client only reported a few of my addons were 7.0 ready, which meant I was not ready to face the game. Plus I had stuff to move in EVE Online.

Last night however, Curse told me I had a quorum when it came to updated addons, so I ventured into the game.

Unfortunately, some addons were less prepared than I was and I had to log back out and uncheck the box that makes WoW load out of date addons. Here I ran into one of a few bugs. I spent some time swapping between characters and, every time I logged out to character select, the game warned me about loading out of date addons.

Warning… over and over…

The checkbox kept getting rechecked every time I logged out. A minor but persistent annoyance, as you get two alerts for it and then have to open up the addons interface and uncheck the option yet again.

Then there was the class resets for 7.0. Every single character that logged in was reminded about talents and such.

And this just keeps coming up…

Basically, I have to figure out all the new class stuff for every single character. I will probably push on this for a while, except for a couple of key characters. For Vikund, my paladin, main, and oldest character, I did go to Icy Veins to read up on the talents so as not to make the “wrong” choice… because there is ALWAYS a wrong choice. The “wrong” choices did surprise me at times.

How can consecrate NOT be the right choice for the level 15 ret pally talent? How is consecrate ever not the right choice?

There is a certain irony in facing this. I came back to WoW about a month ago in order to get back into the swing of things, so as not to be completely lost when the expansion hit. And then, blammo, I need to relearn all the classes from scratch anyway. At least they dropped the 7.0 patch well in advance of the pre-Legion events. We all have some time to get up to speed.

I pottered about the Garrison a bit as well, and the 7.0 transition seemed to have left a few bugs in its wake there. I was, for example, offered the Mastering the Menagerie quest again immediately after completing it. But you cannot complete it again. Ah well.

But I probably spent most of my time tinkering with the new wardrobe/transmog system. You have to focus on the most important things first, right?

My father used to say to me
“Nando, don’t be a schnook,
It’s not how you feel,
It’s how you look!”

As with most everything else in the patch, I knew a change was coming but wasn’t up on the details.

The first thing I noticed was that I got a series of achievement related to transmog upon logging in. The joy of having many alts over many years and storing away a lot of useless but cool looking items meant that I hit the achievement goal for almost every gear slot.

I wanted to see the new stuff, so I opened up collections and went to the new appearance tab to see all that I had.

A captain’s hat!

I sorted through that for a bit, eventually figuring out that, while I could see lots of cool gear, I couldn’t actually DO anything with it from the collections interface. We can see all our options from where ever we are, but if we want to actually change them we still have to go find that Transmog NPC and pay them some gold to update our look.

Yes, we don’t have to pay the void storage fee as well any more, but I am still not clear why Blizz feels they need to be as restrictive as this when it comes to appearance. I look at how EverQuest II and LOTRO and Rift (and even EVE Online) and how they handle this sort of thing, and it just feels like Blizz has something against the whole idea.

One of the things I was looking forward to was clearing all those tabards I have out of my bank to clear up storage space. The appearance system certainly seemed to have scooped them all up and saved them all. If I want to change my tabard appearance, the cost is 20g. But I can avoid that by just going over to the bank and pull the actual tabard out and change it for free… and, being an engineer, I can bring up bank access anywhere, which makes it more convenient than transmog. I just don’t get those 35 or so bank slots back.

Yeah, yeah, I don’t actually change my tabard all that often, but I got the impression at some point that tabards were going to be more like toys than transmog. And the cheapskate in my will likely keep the tabards in my bank. Better make more hexweave bags.

On checking, I found that the one main transmog achievement I missed out on had to do with shirts. I haven’t been collecting shirts.

Missing some shirts…

Nine shirts didn’t seem like much. I figured I could head on over to the auction house and fill out that order and get the last achievement along with the meta achievement and title. Of course, with shirts being a thing in the transmog system, some people were attempting to make some money off of the situation.

That is an expensive shirt

Fortunately, once I sorted by price, I found some more reasonably priced shirts in a much more reasonable price range. I probably could have made a few of them with my tailor. But, with only nine on the list, I was able to scoop those up, put them on (so their appearance got captured), and hey presto, I had the final achievement.

So I have the title “the Fabulous” going for me now.

And that was about all I had the time and patience for on a week night. I logged on a bunch of characters, found many of them had stuff in their inventory that hadn’t been picked up the new system, so there was lots of putting thing on to get them captured. I did tinker with a few looks for lower level characters.

My mid-60s warrior in red

With the weekend I will probably get out and figure out how to play at least one character again. There is still time before the big intro event. Onward to the Broken Isles.